Diary of an Arcade Employee

Asteroids

There are many names that rank as legends in the Golden Age of arcade and video games. Ralph H. Baer, Nolan Bushnell, Allan Alcorn, Walter Day, Billy Mitchell, and Todd Rogers to name just a very few. But there is one name that seems to have been all but forgotten these days, a young man who was once a champion and received national attention on the likes of Saturday Night Sports…
…I’m of course talking about the once legendary Eddie Atari. The man who pioneered the “Italian Maneuver” and some of you might recall when back in 1976 during an Asteroids exhibition he hit his hyperspace button and disappeared for two complete years.
Yes, it turns out we just thought that Atari released Asteroids back in 1979. Being such a rising star it is absolutely hard to believe that anyone could have forgotten the name of Eddie Atari…as well as the tragedy that Saturday Night Sports reporter Matthew Laurence and head anchor Joe Piscopo witnessed on that evening back in 1981 during this live interview.

All my silliness aside, Eddie Murphy is on fire and this skit is worthy of your attention not just to help bring a smile to your face but as a nice reminder at how big arcade games were at the time to enter into such popular television shows like Saturday Night Live!

Have you ever wanted to re-live those Atari 2600 classics in the form of car liveries? If somehow you answered YES to that question, then Hot Wheels created these Atari-branded diecasts just for you! I’m completely smitten with these – the 2013 SDDC exclusive Asteroids “Beach Bomb” pickup above is all sorts of desirable, especially that arcade game packaging. The general release cars below for Tempest, Pong, Breakout, Centipede and Missile Command all lose the special packaging but are still great creations with fantastic artwork and I’d love to own the series.

When Flack recently mentioned this minimalist Atari Wallpaper for Yar’s Revenge in his post about his Yars’ Revenge Cartridge, it got me thinking. Didn’t I do a bunch of these that I did not post. The answer is yes, so here is the first of what I hope will be a few new/old Atari 2600 wallpaper posts. Starting with one I did for the classic, Asteroids.

I played an awful lot of Asteroid on my Atari 2600 this weekend. This inspired me to make a little wallpaper for my desktop to remind me how much I enjoy the game. So here it is, my Atari 2600 Box Art Wallpaper.

As I was busy searching for a particularly nasty program on the Game Grid last night I came across this wonderful piece of Box Art for Omega Race, this is the Atari 2600 port of the arcade game, which was programmed by Ron Haliburton and released by Midway to the arcades back in 1981.

Omega Race was apparently the only Vector Graphics title that Midway released but I’ll be honest, I never bumped into in any of the local arcades in my neck of the woods. Home ports of the game were also released to the Colecovision, VIC-20, and the Commodore 64. So far Midway has failed to include Omega Race in any of it’s Midway Arcade Treasure collections.

The Atari 2600 port also included a free “Booster-Grip” Joystick Adaptor to aid in a closer feel of the arcade game, a button for firing the ships lasers and the second button for thrust.

Judging from this video it looks like a simple but fun game, feels a little like Asteroids.